Saturday, July 31, 2010

There is a new version of Mircosoft Research’s ICE (Image Composite Editor) package available. There are several new features but the important ones are, it handles many images together better, is blindingly fast in the stitching and has a more stable upload to photosythn. I tried it out on this 15 photo panorama set and used the prespective projection. I took the series hand held slowly panning the camera. I didn’t use a gigapan or similar fancy tripod heads, which aim to rotate the camera around the focal center of the lens, or in fact any tripod at all. Ice informed me that my resulting image spans 101.7 horizontally and 30.9 vertically. I haven’t cropped the image edges so you get a feel of the projection. It only took a few seconds. The resulting image preserved maximum detail all 318MB of it! One trouble with trying to work with an image that size, is few of my programs will even load it let alone manipulate it (one exception is picasa). Adobe photoshop essentials falls over loading it and interestingly so does Window photo gallery! Yet Windows Live Photo Gallery does display it but notes it is too large to edit! The image displayed here above is significantly reduced in size (using picasa)

To see the image in its fall glory (and massive full detail) your need to view it as a photosynth,

I was greeted today with this error message, as I tried to view this blog. Yikes this is not good. So how did something potentially nasty as, bin.clear whatever get onto my blog. Why is chrome warning me? I didn’t put it there! Or so I thought…
Turns out CleaSpring is a virally distributed platform to enable widgets to be able to set up on private web pages, blogs and social network site. And I had such a widget for displaying my geotagged photos down on the right hand side column, was the culprit. I gather the sinister bit that Bin.clearspring.com has a tricky flash embed that allows them to track and then aggregate what you are viewing (and then onsell this to advertisers) So it is dangerous a SuperBug?, as the message suggests or is it google not wanting others to be able do better than its own analytics and adsense? Who cares? I don’t like things that collect private info, especially when they don’t tell you and I don’t want my readers being scared away but nasty looking warnings, so no more "free" widgets for me (at least for a while).

The geotagging widget map is gone, If you like seeing where my geotagged photo are taken you can still check out my flickr map (without any warnings).

I must admit I have largely ignored (there are a few isolated posts) the many integrations of photo viewers and managers across the many and rapidly changing mobile phones, iPod/MP3 players and other personal devices. They generally had seriously small screens, For example an iPod Nano that takes movies sound like a great idea till you realise it only takes movies that are240 by 373 pixel, undersized even for you tube. That is this small. However if you are only wishing so share with your friends also on nanos or simpler phones, even for a blog post, it is probably fine.

I also find I have a deep loathing of iTunes, its a dog of a system once you get a fair bit of stuff and truly uncooperative if that stuff is spread across a few computers. Its saving feature was podcasts, it seemed for a long time the best way I could reliably and automatically get podcasts updates to my iPod. With my smaller and lighter sony walkman MP3 player now always in my camera bag, I’ve been looking at Juice (formerly IPodder) and double Twist as ways to do the podcast thing and listen on the walkman. The simpler but still iTunes-like interface and the addition of a picture library in double Twist took my eye and I thought it was time to reinvestigate portable device interconnection and wow a lot is happening there. double Twist also works with android phones, and proclaims itself “iTunes on steroids”, the cure for iPhone envy. Its is, or at least was, an open source project, and is in public beta and free to download. Its real power relates to how easy it is the share media (Photo and movies as well as audio) across a wide range of USB devices and share them with friends (it has a upload to flickr button built in and a web album).

So then I had a look at nokia’s OVI Suite, yes it has a decent upload, download and management of media files as well, but focused on noika product.

Not to forget picasa, it will read photos from a wide range of inputs including mobile phones and there are nice free Picasa web using IPhone App and Android Apps.

The reach of digital photography is ever widening and making those photos easy to upload and share needs to be the first photography lesson these days.

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